research

Is scientific progress suffering from a lack of creativity? This hour, we talk to the author of The Creativity Crisis: Reinventing Science to Unleash Possibility to find out how increasingly cautious funding decisions are impacting scientific innovation and discovery.

In a development that could change the way the deadly Ebola disease is fought, researchers have announced promising results of a new vaccine's trial in Guinea, one of several countries affected by a historic outbreak in West Africa. "The estimated vaccine efficacy was 100 percent," a team of researchers say. The trial was called Ebola ça Suffit — French for "Ebola that's enough." Funded by the World Health Organization and other groups, it started in April and ended on July 20,...

Rhode Island researchers have received $500,000 in federal grant money to investigate a fungus that’s killing native bats. The mysterious illness has attacked bats across North America. Over the last decade, biologists believe an illness known as white-nose syndrome has killed some six-million bats in North America. The fungus appears on the bat’s muzzle. It targets hibernating bats, causing serious infections on their wings, and bodies. Brown University scientist Dr. Richard Bennett has been...

As many outdoorsy Vermonters are discovering, ticks are in plentiful supply this summer . Bad news for humans at risk for Lyme disease. But the bumper crop is providing ample specimens to study and, amazingly, to dissect with some really tiny scalpels.

In secret chemical weapons experiments conducted during World War II, the U.S. military exposed thousands of American troops to mustard gas. When those experiments were formally declassified in the 1990s, the Department of Veterans Affairs made two promises: to locate about 4,000 men who were used in the most extreme tests, and to compensate those who had permanent injuries. But the VA didn't uphold those promises, an NPR investigation has found. NPR interviewed more than 40 living test...

As a young U.S. Army soldier during World War II, Rollins Edwards knew better than to refuse an assignment. When officers led him and a dozen others into a wooden gas chamber and locked the door, he didn't complain. None of them did. Then, a mixture of mustard gas and a similar agent called lewisite was piped inside. "It felt like you were on fire," recalls Edwards, now 93 years old. "Guys started screaming and hollering and trying to break out. And then some of the guys fainted. And finally...

Is scientific progress suffering from a lack of creativity? This hour, we talk to the author of The Creativity Crisis: Reinventing Science to Unleash Possibility to find out how increasingly cautious funding decisions are impacting scientific innovation and discovery.

Wage theft is rampant in the booming residential construction industry in Massachusetts, according to research from UMass Amherst. It has become standard practice in the home building industry in Massachusetts for subcontractors to illegally misclassify workers -- particularly immigrants — as independent contractors. The workers sometimes go weeks without pay, get no compensation for overtime, and are often paid less than they were promised. Tom Juravich, a Umass Amherst labor professor...

Back in the 1960s, the U.S. started vaccinating kids for measles. As expected, children stopped getting measles. But something else happened. Childhood deaths from all infectious diseases plummeted. Even deaths from diseases like pneumonia and diarrhea were cut by half. Scientists saw the same phenomenon when the vaccine came to England and parts of Europe . And they see it today when developing countries introduce the vaccine. "In some developing countries, where infectious...

About half of all children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, or ASD, also have serious behavioral problems, such as irritability, aggression, and non-compliance. A new study by Yale University and a consortium of five other universities shows that parents who are given a set of specific strategies and techniques can reduce disruptive behavior in their autistic child.

Two UConn professors who’ve been accused of misusing funds from the National Science Foundation didn’t fully read documentation that required them to disclose a conflict of interest, according to state auditors.

When a major earthquake pummeled Kobe, Japan, in 1995, more than 6,000 people were killed, many buried as their traditional wooden homes collapsed under the weight of heavy, unstable tile roofs. The quake's power was extraordinary and demonstrated Japan wasn't as prepared as it thought it was. Still, it was no match for Japanese resilience. Many surviving families went directly to schools and spread out quilts in orderly rows in the gym. Boxed meals were handed out around the clock. Bottled...

Despite laws in many states that protect non-smokers from secondhand smoke, exposure remains especially high for children ages three to eleven, African-Americans, and those who live in poverty or rental housing, according to a recent report .

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ki6kQT7YPQY Mike Massimino is one of the last people to ever see the Hubble Space Telescope in person. From inside his orbiting space shuttle, the telescope first appeared on the horizon as a star, says Massimino , who was an astronaut on the final mission to service the space telescope in 2009. "It keeps getting bigger and bigger, and then eventually it starts looking like a telescope," he says. Up close, the Hubble looked as good as the day it was launched...

For the last few decades, lobsters have had to prove that they were healthy enough to ship by having blood drawn. Now, thanks to a Connecticut native, all they’ll have to do is prove their strength in the most lobster of methods: by squeezing sensors with their claws.

The Large Hadron Collider — the giant particle accelerator in Switzerland that confirmed the Higgs boson — is back online after two years and ready to ramp up to twice its previous proton-smashing energy. CERN , the European Organization for Nuclear Research, live blogged the restart here . The LHC was shut down to consolidate some 10,000 electrical interconnections between magnets, add protection systems, improve cryogenics, vacuums and electronics and boost the (proton) beam energy from 6.5...

You may leave the radio or the TV on for your kitty when you head off to work, but new research is saying that might not be the best idea. Instead, why not try out a few of these songs, composed specifically for your cat master?

Updated at 4 p.m. ET A Russian rocket has carried a Russian cosmonaut and an American astronaut to the International Space Station, where they will live for a full year, twice as long as people usually stay. No American has remained in space longer than 215 days. Only a few people have ever gone on space trips lasting a year or more — the longest was 437 days — and they're all Russian cosmonauts. The last year-plus stay in space occurred nearly two decades ago. What's more,...

Doctors have been treating the symptoms of their patients, often before they know the cause, for centuries. But as medicine has gained sophistication and precision, we've slowly demanded more of our doctors. We want them to treat us, but also to know what we have, and why we have it, and how to treat and cure it.

The thinking about alcohol dependence used to be black and white. There was a belief that there were two kinds of drinkers: alcoholics and everyone else. "But that dichotomy — yes or no, you have it or you don't — is inadequate," says Dr. John Mariani , who researches substance abuse at Columbia University. He says that the thinking has evolved, and that the field of psychiatry recognizes there's a spectrum. Problems with alcohol run the gamut from mild to severe. And there are as many kinds...